Sofia’s Sense of a Positive Future

Sofia is one of the very few female founding general partners in the world. She is not a typical VC. The child of first generation Moroccan immigrants, the 31 year old grew up and studied in Paris’s banlieue at La Courneuve and made it from there to one of Paris’s elite business schools, HEC Paris.

Her career has encompassed tech innovation throughout with stints at Index Ventures, Europe’s top venture capital firm, and Deezer, the worldwide digital music service, where she was in charge of international expansion.

Prior to setting up Future Positive Capital (FPC), an early-stage VC, she spent two years building the pillars of the firm by investing in companies like what3words and HomeTree as well as Ynsect and Streetbees in collaboration with renowned investors.

Sofia Hmich (C) with her team at Future Positive Capital. (Source: Techcrunch)

Sofia Hmich and her team (pictured above), based in London and Paris, now seeks Europe’s boldest entrepreneurs who use advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, genetics, and other deep technologies to solve problems such as feeding the world’s growing population sustainably, tackling climate change and coping with an ageing population. In other words, deep-tech companies solving global needs.

Indeed, they believes major global factors of change, such as the acceleration and convergence of advanced technologies, new aspirations from the workforce and consumers, huge macro demographic shifts and stronger regulation have led to a real tipping point in our global economy which has created unique conditions for these new companies to thrive.

“Future Positive Capital captures the zeitgeist of our time. At a macro level, we see a universalization of challenges, where problems that once were those of “others” are now those of everyone. The consequences of climate change is the most obvious example,” said Sofia, “the time is right to build an investment firm based on the conviction that the greatest value creation will be driven by companies that are necessarily interconnected with improving the human and planetary condition.”

This explains why FPC targets blind spots in existing European venture capital funding. Many venture capital investors remain highly concentrated in a handful of sectors (consumer, fintech, marketing etc.) focusing on web and mobile technologies that target mainly wealthier consumers, leaving a long tail of opportunities for investors who are willing to back the next generation of visionary entrepreneurs.

Hence, even though the initial target size for the fund was $55m (£43m), Future Positive Capital fund ended up with an oversubscription at first close with $57.1m (£45m) in commitments as backers show strong interest in companies that solve the world’s most pressing problems.